On May 26, 2011, at 3:36 AM, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote: > On 5/26/11, Kevin K <kevink1 at fidnet.com> wrote: >> Though thumb drives are flash, they tend to use a slower flash than what is >> used in hard drive replacement units. > > No actual industry facts for this, but I think the Flash used in thumb > drives are not really any slower by nature/design. This is because I > see that the fastest SSD currently tend to use 8 channel controllers > for 200+ MB/s performance which translate to 20~30MB/sec per channel. > > The better USB 2.0 thumb drives can do about 20+ MB, Kingston even has > a new one that will supposedly do 70+ when connected via USB 3.0. If > we take 8 of these and RAID 0 them which is pretty much what the > 8-channel controller is doing, we're looking at pretty similar numbers > between the flash cells in thumb drives and "SSD". > > >> I think that many people, when talking about SSD, may be thinking of drives in the form factor of a hard drive. Either 2.5" or 3.5". Which would probably not be called a thumb >> drive :) > > Only because it doesn't come with a USB connector! ;) OK. Not really slower for the flash, but still slower than what an USB based SSD drive would be. But since they are designed for USB, performance can be lower. Especially for the cheaper drives. I would assume, but don't know, that those drives marketed as ReadyBoost (?) for Vista or later may be faster . Another thing that probably makes them seem slow is when some systems default to write cache disabled. For protection on systems like Windows where people might not remember to "safely remove".